Global Partnership For Education Supports Teachers In North-East Nigeria

Global Partnership For Education GPE Interventions has supported over 18000 unqualified teachers working in North-eastern Nigeria.

The support which is a major achievement of the GPE in Nigeria was targeted at helping the teachers to study and pass the professional qualifying examinations of the Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria.

This was made known by the UNICEF Chief of Maiduguri Field Office ,  Phuong Nguyen, at a One day media dialogue session held to amplify the achievements of the Global Partnership for Education Accelerated Funding project in Borno State, North-East Nigeria.

According to Nguyen, the 12 month course was funded by the GPE AF and supported by UNICEF, Teaching at the Right Level (TARL) Africa and the Nigeria Union of Teachers.

She added that it was the first training of its kind targeting a large cohort of teachers in Nigeria.

The UNICEF Chief of field office disclosed that at least 1 million girls and boys will benefit as the newly certified teachers return to their classrooms equipped with modern and effective teaching methods, including the skills to provide gender-sensitive and psychosocial support to learners.

“UNICEF is excited that we might finally be turning the tide against high dropout rate as well as facilitating access and retention of children in school. Millions more children will surely have better learning outcomes with a large cohort of motivated, trained, prepared, and equipped teachers in classrooms across the north-east.“

Classroom Renovation

She also made known that under the GPE project classrooms in at least 50 schools have been renovated and 50 temporary learning spaces were constructed.

“Over 500,000 children have been provided with learning materials. The capacity of 438 education officials have been strengthened on education-in- emergency leadership, and result-based planning and budgeting. We will discuss further other achievements of this project during the dialogue.“

Challenges Facing Basic Education In Northeast

Nguyen added that across north-east Nigeria, Only 29 percent of schools have teachers with the minimum qualification.

“The average pupil-teacher ratio is 124:1, while half of all schools in the region need rehabilitation.“

The dialogue further revealed that only 47 percent of schools in Borno state have furniture with lower proportions in Yobe state(32 percent) and Adamawa state (26 percent). In Adamawa, only 30 percent of schools have adequate learning materials for pupils with lower proportions (26 percent) in Borno and (25 percent) in Yobe.

Chairman Borno State Universal Basic Education Board, Prof Bulama Kagu said that the State government is cognisance of providing furniture in schools through the matching grants from the federal government. 

“Due to burning down of schools over the years by insurgents we have had responsibilities to catch up with provision of furniture but again most of our contractors contribute to this shortage due to untimely delivery of these infrastructure.“

UNICEF Chief of Education Saadhna Panday Soobrayan, recommended that States should come up with frameworks on Out of School children challenge while UNICEF works with stakeholders to scale up programs that will reduce Out of school children across the states.